“Oh shit oh shit oh shit!” The gingerhaired catgirl cursed as she dropped packages everywhere, trying to open the door with one hand, and gesture wildly with the other to negate the banishing spell on the front door set to ward off strangers and Jehovah’s Witnesses. Tamar had forgotten about it in the rush of shoe shopping till she felt the prickle of energy building and was now frantically trying to avoid being poofed off to some random unpleasant location.

“Raa-” was all the cry she managed to get out before a brilliant flash of light enveloped the shapely familiar and she was gone.

Raamiel Marshack arrived at the penthouse in a dark mood, characteristically so but made worse by lack of a certain level of vodka in his system. The impeccably dressed archmage stopped up short, eyebrows raised behind his dark designer sunglasses, “…the fuck?” as he surveyed the scene: tumbled packages of exorbitantly expensive women’s shoes scattered around the opened front door to his abode, a slightly singed spot on the ground, with some ginger fur smoldering in the center of it and the unmistakeable smell of singed cat. He pressed his index finger and his thumb to the bridge of his nose, squeezing closed his ruby eyes with a sigh of annoyance as he gestured effortlessly with the other hand, lips moving soundlessly as he sought, found, and apperated his familiar in short order.

Tamar stood on the front steps shivering, dripping wet, coughing violently, her lovely face pale, eye makeup running in dark rivulets down her cheeks, hair, ears, and tail hanging in pitiful, sodden masses as she glanced up at him sheepishly.

Raamiel tugged on his leather gloves, gave the female a tsk and pushed past her into his house, “Clean up that mess, you silly catslut. And next time you forget I may leave you there,” stalking to the bar to fix himself a vodka on the rocks, hold the ice, leaving the catgirl to scramble to gather her purchases, now soggy, and drag them in before slipping off quietly for a hot shower to wash the ocean out of her hair.

My love for you is chemical bonding,
nanotubes within nanotubes of nuances, dreams, desires
that stretch across the universe and back.

My love for you exists on frequencies as yet unheard of,
maybe some far-flung day a future scanner will pick up the resonations, and the operator will be astounded at the implications.

My love for you is a virus,
a self-replicating program that insinuates itself into my every waking thought, every restless dream of you. Until all that is not you is assimilated, and I am left with only a shell that performs my basic functions, but is overwritten by you.

I want to go to sleep with some part,
any part of my body touching yours.
As though that contact, that connection
would protect me as I pass from waking
to sleep from conscious to that helpless
unconscious state that flirts with death.
I tell myself that even in that twilight land
of disjointed, wandering dreams and desires-
that you would feel my hand on your shoulder,
a tremor and know what I was feeling
and seeing and you would somehow find me
in all of my nightmares, follow that tangible
link of skin to skin to wrap around me and help me
fight off my daemons and pull me back up to life.

Somehow…I tell myself. If only I can go to sleep touching you, all will be well.

You exist in more than digital for me now
an analog of everything I ever wanted.

On some submolecular level I must be aware
of the fact that the actual you, the physical you,
the height and mass and density of you
cannot possibly live up to the hypothesized
concept of you.

And yet.

And yet you keep me in a state of high entropy
every cell in my body charged with the excitement
of exploring this as-of-yet-unexperienced frontier of you.
Eliminating the myriad quantum possibilities of you
till I am left with only the singular reality of you,
observable there before me,
the cushion of my couch compressed by your body
the air I breathe stirred in unseen eddies of CO2
expelled by your lungs, and my eyes, and ears, and
tongue, and nose, and fingers all carefully gathering
the information of you–it is all new and I am consumed
by this need to know you.

She had to. There was no where to run. Nothing but the empty tub, crew in stasis till they hit destination orbit, and infinite space. She sat back down, tightened down the disarrayed straps, and touched her shaking fingers to the keypad.

David, why?

It was all she could think to say. She had ached to touch him, so many times. She’d thought, maybe- after this run, they might could meet. But now?

This wasn’t supposed to happen, Aria. I wasn’t supposed to…

She frowned, a catch in her throat. She was confused now, as much as hurt. She reached for the keypad, stopped herself, unsure. A tear broke free from her eye and drifted down in a wobbling sphere as she finally typed.

I don’t understand.

The reply chilled her, her damp skin suddenly cold in the recycled air and she was unable to move for a moment as she stared numbly at the screen.

And that was it, her work for the day completed. She was technically off the clock, or would be if there was a clock to be off.

She tended to avoid checking the date/time- it generally depressed her. These long haul trips paid well, for ridiculously easy work, but the downside was you were stuck on the ‘tub’- for months, sometimes even years at a time, depending on the length of the jump.

She sat at the console, staring at it for a moment, looking for the flashing blue light that indicated received message. Nothing. He was apparently still at work, himself.

She half smiled, pushed herself back with a sigh, talking to herself, “Might as well get PT over with.”

Physical Training was necessary on a tub, this fact had been drummed in to her her entire life. At half gee, you had to exercise, or your body would deteriorate- she heard the voice in her head preaching to her about the dire consequences of allowing your physical fitness to lapse while on a jump.

“Yeah, yeah…I’m on it. Quit fucking nagging,” she muttered to no one at all.

Later, after the shower, clean jumpsuit mostly zipped up, hair still in short, damp ringlets around her face, she made her way back to the console, looking hopefully for the blue light.

The excited yip when she saw it rang down the conduit tube as she pulled herself down and strapped herself back in. He was there!

She started typing her greeting to him, the smile lighting up her face almost as much as the dull cyan glow of the monitor, then froze as she read his post.

She always felt like crying after saying goodbye to him, after severing the tenuous online connection with him and she felt her loneliness rushing in to press on her more acutely. The silence where his voice had been only a second ago hung in the air like the last reverberations of a string instrument vibrating off into the ether and for a few moments, she didn’t dare make a sound as she tried to hold onto those sonic ghosts for as long as possible.

The screen was dark, and the abrupt and empty silence when the monitor finally and completely shut down was jarring, disconcerting and she sagged in her chair, head down on the console as she drew in a long, slow breath. She had to get to bed. She knew she needed sleep, yet one step away from the workstation was a step further away from him, or at least the place for her interface with him. But he wasn’t there. Not at the moment anyway. He was going to sleep himself, had told her good night and that he loved her.

He loved her.

She reached for that thought, to buoy her spirits long enough to get her to lift her head, wipe her tears, stand and make her way out to her bunk. The lower gravity made the trip down the tube a series of gentle bounces, her hand sliding along the railing as she unhooked her line and keyed in her code. Her noise of exasperation echoed down the empty tube, dimly lit by the cyan blue service lights that were the only ones to stay on during the sleep-cycle time. She leaned down, squinted, and tried her code again. She knew she’d stayed up too long, was too tired, and was making mistakes. Sleep would help. She might dream about him while she slept. The thought brought a wan smile and a hopeful inhalation of stale air as the door rolled open and she drifted into her room.